Decide NOW!

Successful people achieve great things for themselves and others because they use their God-given ability to plan.

 

One of the many ways we differ from animals is that our brains have a frontal lobe that houses the ability to contemplate the future. There have been cases where individuals suffered damage to this frontal lobe and lost the ability to think ahead. They could not tell you what they were going to be doing tomorrow. They were trapped in the present.

 

Daniel Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, published by Random House in New York in 2007, reported that about 12% of a person's time is spent thinking about the future. Unfortunately this is only an average. A lot of people do little or no planning. They live from day to day. In fact, some spend more time in the past than they do in the future- reliving their painful or enjoyable experiences, fretting over past mistakes, reviewing injustices inflicted upon them, and so on.

 

About the only thing that some people do that could be construed as planning is to write lists of things to do. And that's good because at least they know what should be done. But To Do lists do absolutely nothing to further a task. In many cases, they simply frustrate us by reminding us of all the things we haven't done yet.

 

Take it one step further and decide when you will do the things that really count, and block out the necessary time. Decide now what you will do in the future.